1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates generally to information exchange systems and, more particularly, to a quality exchange system providing the capability to receive characteristic data, including quality information, standardize the characteristic data, and present the standardized characteristic data.
2. Description of the Prior Art and Related Information
Most commercial products are manufactured in volume by manufacturers who procure a variety of components from a variety of suppliers to assemble and sell an end product. Inevitably, a certain number of these end products will be returned to the manufacturer because they have reportedly failed in some way when a user attempted to use the product.
Historically, a significant percentage of these returned products are found to include no defects when subsequently evaluated by the manufacturer. Although no defects were found, many of these returned products may be scrapped, or re-tested and re-shipped, usually at a discount from the original selling price of the product. A manufacturer thus is subjected to losses from the testing of products that have no apparent defect and from the loss of revenue resulting from the scraping or discounting. Alternatively, a number of returned products actually might be defective, having failed due to one or more defective components that tend to fail according to a pattern of characteristic data. The pattern may not be obvious.
The return rate of a particular product, in some cases, may be influenced by the use of a particular component, either in isolation or in combination with other components purchased from one or more of the aforementioned variety of suppliers. To discover and characterize this influence, data warehousing and data mining techniques can be deployed if characteristic data for the components can be accessed.
Recently, Internet-based exchanges have been deployed to facilitate the purchase of components and products in a more efficient manner. In general, however, the purchase of components through these Internet-based exchanges does not provide the necessary information to support investigations directed toward discovering component characteristic data influences on product returns. A need therefore exists for a system and method for compiling and accessing component characteristic data in an Internet-based exchange environment such that meaningful analysis can be conducted to discover patterns that may influence product returns. Further, since different manufacturers may employ different methods and bases for measuring and reporting their component characteristic data, a meaningful analysis would be greatly facilitated by uniformly presenting the each manufacturer's component characteristic data in accordance with a preselected standard.